EXAMINING WHY DIVINE INTERVENTION IS A SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEF

The person thinking of only natural causes thinks of things that just happen.  They are not caused by any intention or person. They are blind.  This clearly does not fit the notion of God.  Believers incredibly do think of things just happening and then argue that certain events happen that would not have happened without a God.  A miracle is basically that which would not have happened without a supernatural being doing it.  Christians say Jesus came back to life and God did it.  Otherwise it would not have happened.  There is no mention of the view that aliens did it is equal to the view that God did it.  In fact aliens are at least possible and might be able to raise the dead.  An odd natural explanation is better than one masquerading as a religious one.  The view that God did it is just magic.  Even if it were not necessarily so, the same weakness in us that looks for magic is behind our interest in affirming it is supernatural.

A miracle is a miracle.  Believers have the nerve to say that a man rising from the dead should be believed in for men long dead said so and when they left no affidavits even. It makes no sense to say that and less sense - if that were possible - to spread such a doctrine to others.  It is foolish to make it matter more than 12 people today who reliably report that a crushed butterfly came back to life in front of them and vanished.  In fact believers do not really respect and believe in miracles.  They want to weaponise them to promote a belief, a faith product. If a miracle is a miracle then there is no real respect for God as he might really be.  Believers are clearly building their own idea of God around God and calling it God.

Divine intervention basically means that something happened that would not happen if there were no God to act and do it.  Don't get side-tracked with material such as, "Divine intervention is the wrong concept for it suggests God is standing outside the universe and is not involved except for the occasional intervention.  God is closer to all things than they are to themselves.  He is always deeply involved."  That is an attempt to stop you seeing holes in the concept.  It wants you bogged down by definitions.  It seeks to confuse you to hide something.  By divine intervention we are referring to how it looks like nothing is happening and something does and the agent is God. 

The data is that even if the religious teaching here about divine intervention is okay, they don't care about that.  The evidence is that believers do indeed mentally keep God out except when they want to affirm a wonder or miracle.  This is not even a God of the Gaps.  It is a God who is ignored until they can find some cultural or ideological use for him.

Religion says that science tries to tell us how things work not why they exist. It is trying to push you to its God to deal with the why. We tend to think that God helps us with the question of why there is anything when there might not be anything at all.

Its assertion ignores that there are things made to look as if they are just there and that is that. That includes whole galaxies that may have no inhabitants.  If that is a deception then God cannot be trusted with miracles and the resurrection of Jesus might have been an illusion or somebody else was risen and thought he was Jesus.  Who knows?

If the religious are really believers in a creator God who is closely involved in all that he has made then they would say, "Things around us seem to have a closely related why and how. The how can matter as much as the why. Or more.  What if God could miraculously make a temporary lever so I can move a boulder? It is only there for the how. The how and the why are as good as the same but the how matters more than the why here."

They lie a lot about the how science is about the how and religion is about the why.  In fact, science says what a man is.  Jesus was a man if he lived.  And the Church takes this science and says it is part of its faith.  Get that?  Science and doctrine can merge and overlap.  Religion is lying when it says science does its thing and it does its thing.  Religion fears how science can research and overthrow its claims.

Something happens and then something happens.  In a nut shell, there are two possibilities, “Is what I see down to one thing causing the other? Why does B follow A?” Or, “Is it coincidence that B follows A?” Science is about weeding out the fallacy that assumes that just because something follows something that the two are linked. The goal is to not get rid of uncertainty but to reduce it.  For that reason, to suggest a God may tamper wrecks science.  What is the point of research if a miracle is the reason why flowers grow after being watered and it is not biology though it seems to be?  It undermines. 

Coincidences can be remarkable.  Every person is guilty of ignoring some startling ones while centering on others.  The impact coincidences make tends to be very personal and subjective. 

A coincidence is a package not just a one off thing. You have a laptop. You tamper with its programming and by accident every time now you add 1 and 1 in a spreadsheet it gives 3.  That has sweeping consequences despite seeming a minor thing.  1+1+10 are going to be 13!  And it goes on forever.  The coincidence is tricky and prone to imposing an illusion on you for you see one thing that stands out and you exclude everything else.  The awe and good impression and sense of divine intervention we may get from the coincidence is largely self-created.  Every coincidence is just something you spot in a series and you stop looking at everything else but the something.

Coincidences can make something that is not a miracle seem to be one.  Our appetite for coincidences is why we are prone to accepting that miracle tales can be taken seriously.  A miracle is a supernatural coincidence.  While religion says we should believe in miracles - events that nature cannot do and which would not be happening were there no God - it at the same time admits that coincidence and chance can make something remarkable but not miraculous pass for a miracle.  Perhaps vital information is lost.  That sort of thing.

Science knows some unknown law could be making something happen that looks to be against what we know of nature.  It keeps researching.  It does not reason, "It is a miracle.  Or it may be.  So why try so hard to examine it scientifically?"  That ends the conversation.

David Hume gives an example of a miracle claim that should be believed. He says no claim ever made can match it. It may be hypothetical but it is obvious that no religion, no gospel-writer, nobody could reach its perfectly reasonable standard.  Let us take a look.

Quote:

I own, that otherwise, there may possibly be miracles, or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit of proof from human testimony; though, perhaps, it will be impossible to find any such in all the records of history. Thus, suppose, all authors, in all languages, agree, that, from the first of January 1600, there was a total darkness over the whole earth for eight days: suppose that the tradition of this extraordinary event is still strong and lively among the people: that all travellers, who return from foreign countries, bring us accounts of the same tradition, without the least variation or contradiction: it is evident, that our present philosophers, instead of doubting the fact, ought to receive it as certain, and ought to search for the causes whence it might be derived. The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered probable by so many analogies, that any phenomenon, which seems to have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.

End of quote.

Hume simply asks for a high standard of independent testimony.  Religion will bleat, "But you are never going to get that".  But that is not the point.  We should get it and can.  It is not the argument's fault if human nature won't stop messing up.  Also God should be able to provide evidence so it is not our problem.  It is a problem religion has concocted.  Religion simply tries to distract you.  The resurrection claims around Jesus did not even interest many people in his country at the time.  That was how convincing they were!  We don't even have twelve authors in the line of those Hume mentioned.  It would be something if we did.

The claim that we have no exhaustive knowledge of what is out there or even of our own bodies therefore to assume miracles cannot happen, or do not happen even if they can, is an act of faith is interesting. It is an act of belief not faith. It is not a faith assumption. A faith assumption is when you think some otherworldly person, perhaps some higher power is trying to connect with you by getting your attention by doing a miracle. It would be odd to call thinking that miracles as gifts promising help being impossible, faith.

To have faith that miracles do not happen would be putting faith in the majority of people who say they cannot confirm that they have.  To have faith that they do happen is putting faith in a small handful that say they have taken place.  One thing is for sure, you do not have faith in both camps.

Belief can lead to bias. Faith even more so for you feel you are calling somebody a liar if you start to wonder if your faith is misplaced.

So belief is better if you want a better if still imperfect shot at finding truth.

What if faith was needed to deny or affirm miracles? It would be needed to sit on the fence too. And what if you had to toss a coin between faith for or against miracles?  Religion only cares about one outcome, faith for.  Clearly faith that they don’t happen would be the more sensible for you don’t need miracles or belief in them, not even in the way you need ice cream on a hot day.

It is faith when you affirm miracles. It is faith when you deny them. It is faith when you effectively do both by not deciding between them. If everything then is faith nothing is. See the claim, “If you don’t share my faith that God has done miracles you have faith that he does not so you may as well agree with me” as what it is. Lies and manipulation and gaslighting.

You will be accused of thinking that just because you have not seen a miracle that nobody else has. In fact no sceptic argues like that. How stupid do people think you are? Sceptics identify problems with the testimony and the evidence. That is all.

People do not want a God who is there and who may be sustaining all nature but who has it arranged to behave like purely natural causes.  They want what they think he could do.  They want him to make the burglar about to stab you drop dead.  It is the feeling that he can overthrow the way nature is working against you that people want, not God as such.  Faith in general in a higher God is a house of delusions is easy to build but drafty to live in.  That is my final word.